Gail Ker, the chief executive of Access Community Services, is known for her 25 plus years of dedication, compassion, humility, and tireless work to help Logan City’s poorest and most vulnerable community members secure ‘the dignity of a job’.
Under Ms Ker’s tutelage, Access has grown from a one room youth employment service in Logan City into one of Australia’s leading organisations in the provision of settlement, employment, training, youth support, housing, and social enterprise services for migrants, refugees, and Australian-born clients with an annual turn over in excess of twenty million dollars.
Ms Ker moved to Logan City in 1975 and said she can’t imagine leaving such a community focused city.
“I was married at the time when we moved and we bought our first home here,” she said.
“I was working with my husband at our jewelry shop, doing the books and some administration work.
“There’s just something about the spirit of the people here in Logan. It’s the community that makes it.”
Ms Ker said her first job in the humanitarian sector was at a woman’s only job club in Logan City.
“It was in the late 1980s, my marriage had ended and I needed to find another job,” she said.
“There was a part time role in the Logan women’s job club. It was an exclusive women only job club and it was the only and first of its kind in Australia.
“I ran a mentoring program. Women did a three week program to try and help them get a job.”
Ms Ker said it was that first women’s only job club that helped her find her niche and purpose in life.
“I just found what I was meant to do,” she said.
“For me it’s always been about work and getting people ready to commence their jobs and their lives and to become a part of the community.
“Once I knew what I wanted to do I went to uni as a mature aged student in my thirties. It took me seven long painful years as an external part time student.”
This was while Ms Ker started a new job, again helping people to become employed, and was a very involved single mother.
“I juggled a lot of things but it was worth it,” she said.
“I remember as I was driving my kids and taking them to sports and other extracurricular activities and I’d bring along my uni books and fit in some study while there.”
Logan is a very multicultural community, and Ms Ker said this is what makes it the best place to be and work.
“We’ve got over 217 ethnic and racial groups represented in Logan. So all of my work, even way back at the women’s job club, was at a time when migration and people coming from war torn countries was a feature of what we did,” she said.
“We had people coming here for opportunities and generally it was that of a refugee experience.”
This work involved meeting migrants and refugees at the airport and taking them to their new home in Logan City.
“It was all about helping them to become a part of our community,” Ms Ker said.
“And a big part of that is helping them to find work.
“The dignity of a job is something people make the sacrifice for. They came here for a better life for themselves and usually their children.
“Even if their own experience isn’t continued, they invest in their kids and want the best for them. They just want to give them the opportunity to have a better life, that’s why they came here.
“It’s a very humbling job to be able to see people carve a new future out even though there might be barriers, which was the reason they became refugees in the first place.”
Ms Ker said she believes the work she does with migrants and refugees tells the ‘Australian Story’.
“Apart from our first nations people, our traditional owners and custodians of the land, migration right back to our colonisation is the feature of our nation,” she said.
“We’re a country built on our migrants and refugees.
“Logan is just one of the best examples of multiculturalism at its best.”
